The REAL Problem with Cleaning Out Your Junk Drawers

This morning we saw this fantastic junk drawer makeover from Kathleen and it's a true thing of beauty. But sometimes it can be hard to look at a clean drawer and think about your own dirty drawers (yes I'm 6 and really just wanted to say dirty drawers). Where will the legless Spideman Doll go? How about the bit of ribbon that is long enough to use on something … sometime … why would we throw that out? What's the real problem here?

Most homes will have an eternal struggle with junk drawers. Sometimes they open easily, sometimes things spring out of them like a can of compressed snakes and sometimes you never get things back out of them, only put them in it.

The real problem at hand is only keeping what you need. That's easy to do when you're talking about a coffee table you no longer love (hello, Craigslist!) or pieces in your wardrobe that you've grown out of (hello, Thrift Store!), but what about all the little things? What about the small bits of stuff you can't really part with, but can't really throw away.

The junk collector in us all wants to keep every bread tie, every pen that still has ink in it (even if it has melted crayon or something random stuck to it), and every nail, screw or small piece of ribbon that could potentially be used for something. But that's not always what's healthiest for the home.

When my husband and I moved several years ago we had two junk drawers. They were full of many of the things listed above (complete with legless Spiderman) and although we had hopes of one day finding his leg (he was vintage) it didn't so us any good to keep little things around when they ended up taking up far more space than a few drawers.

In reality they plagued our minds, the cluttered drawers really just created anxiety and gave us an out. An out to what? An out to making everything in your home have a place to return to. So in the end, junk drawers just end up being filled with junk and in turn creating more clutter. Instead, organize what you have, toss the rest and quit calling them junk drawers! Think of them as "necessity drawers" instead and see what the change of mindset can really do for your family!

Share your thoughts on your own dirty drawers (yup, still funny) in the comments below!